Our brave troops are being lost in a war with no end

LABOUR’S vanity has become increasingly lethal for British troops in Afghanistan.

Hundreds more brave young men are being sacrificed on the altar of Gordon Brown’s socialist arrogance.

It is an outrage that our soldiers should be treated as nothing more
than political fodder by a gang of sleazy, unpatriotic Left-wing
mediocrities who have no concept of Britain’s national interest.

The war in Aghanistan has lost all sense of purpose. It has descended
into a gruesome form of gesture politics, devoid of any realistic
military objective.

Desperate to curry favour with President obama’s US
administration and too cowardly to admit the failure of its flawed
strategy, Brown’s regime presides over a mounting death toll without
being able to give any coherent explanation for the presence of our
armed forced in this tribal wasteland.

As the politicians flounder in a moral quagmire of their own making,
the dangers to our servicemen increase. Over the past 10 days no fewer
than 15 British soldiers have lost their lives in action against the
Tali- ban while, last Friday, eight men were killed, five of them in a
single attack.

If these heroes had died in defence of Britain, their loss would be more bearable.

The total number of deaths from British operations in Afghanistan now
stands at 184, even higher than in the disastrous operation in Iraq.

If these heroes had died in defence of Britain, their loss would be more bearable. But the tragedy is that they have been killed in a conflict that has nothing to do with our country.

What is just as sickening is that Labour Ministers have not one ounce of the courage, decency, patriotism or honour

exhibited by the men and women who have been sent to their deaths in this pointless conflict. Brown himself is perhaps the most cowardly figure ever to enter Downing Street.

His Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth is a fifth-rate party apparatchik whose recent appointment in the June Cabinet reshuffle showed how little Brown really cares about our armed forces.

Nor is the Foreign Secretary David Miliband a man to inspire any faith in the Government’s patriotic resolution. Goofy, immature and shallow, he is not someone you would want to have beside you in the trenches.

Having spent all his life in the world of Labour politics he comes across as an earnest student activist rather than a

statesman of integrity.

Over recent days his rhetoric has grown ever more shameless and absurd. He proclaimed in one outburst that the military campaign “is about the future of Britain”. In another, he argued that if Britain failed in Afghanistan “we are not going to be able to secure our own country”.

This kind of juvenile points-scoring belongs in a student union debate, not in the justification of military intervention.

It is nonsense to pretend that the fight against Islamic terrorism in Britain is predicated on success in the Afghan war.

All the serious outrages here over recent years, such as the 2005 London bombings or the 2007 attack on Glasgow airport, were perpetrated by home-grown zealots. And they were home-grown precisely because the Government of Miliband, Brown and Ainsworth has allowed extremism to flourish in our midst, both through the abolition of border controls and the promotion of the ideology of cultural diversity.

Across the world, Britain is now recognised by security agencies as a hotbed of dangerous Islamic radicalism.

According to the Metropolitan Police there are more than 2,000 serious Muslim terrorists operating here. It is a profound insult to our soldiers dying in Afghanistan that they should be lectured about the importance of fighting Islamic extremism, while at home the authorities, wallowing in political correctness, do nothing to combat the

spread of sharia law, forced marriages, corruption or hate crime.

We are told we have to fight for democracy in Afghanistan yet mass immigration has turned parts of municipal Britain into local banana republics.

Only last weekend it emerged that the Home office advised police officers to take a lenient approach to Muslim zealots who might be inciting religious hatred or viewing extremist material on the internet.

“We need to be able to support individuals who are drawn into criminal activity,” said an official.

This enfeebled language makes a mockery of Miliband’s claim that we are fighting Islamic extremism.

Indeed, the whole Afghan policy is riddled with contradictions and hypocrisies. So the courageous young men who are battling in Helmand Province are on basic pay of just £16,500 a year, yet Afghan single mother Toorakai Saiedi is given £170,000 a year in state benefits to live in a mansion in west London.

Our troops are denied the helicopters, equipment and numbers they need to be effective because of Treasury cut-backs, yet taxpayers’ cash is lavished on grants for Muslim community groups in a craven bid to appease hardliners.

The whole campaign is sliding into a macabre farce. one of Brown’s predecessors as Labour leader, Neil Kinnock,

caused outrage in the 1983 general election by attacking Mrs Thatcher for “spilling the guts” of British soldiers in the Falklands.

But that was a successful war fought in defence of core British interests.

Today, Brown is spilling the guts of brave British troops in a meaningless, mismanaged operation for nothing but his